Stony Creek has swung into full fashion again - much like it was during the Victorian era, when hotels sprang up on a few of the larger islands and steam-powered boats brought folks from Bridgeport and beyond for huge old-fashioned clambakes.

"It's become an exclusive community," Milne says one recent morning as the Charly More noses out of the town dock and toward the Thimbles. He named the ferryboat after an old English nautical term that means "honest man."

Milne has run the ferry service and tour boat for 15 years, starting at 26. He follows a legendary cast of "characters," as he calls them, or captains who ran it before him.

`'I never dreamed of being the captain of the ferryboat,'' he says. `'I thought you had to be an old man."

For a while, Milne left the Creek after high school, "searching for myself, like everybody does," he says while smiling, wearing his sunglasses and an orange baseball hat. His mustache is long enough to give that salty, sea-captain look. He pulls a cigarette out of a pack of Marlboros in his shorts pocket.

`'I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau. I grew up in a waterfront town. I guess water was in my Scottish blood. Most of my ancestors were fishermen, and most of them are at the bottom of the North Sea."

When Milne found out that following famed undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau would involve four years of taking biology courses, he switched gears and decided `'maybe I like driving boats more than counting squid eggs." His course took him north to the Southern Maine Vocational Technical Institute in Portland, where he took a two-year marine studies program. When he earned his captain's license in 1984, jobs were hard to come by; he went to Louisiana seeking work, but nothing decent was available, and he came back to Stony Creek.

There is the amusing and abusing of the islanders, a long tradition for the ferry captain to maintain - he does, after all, have to put up with a share himself. People have brought everything from pianos to refrigerators and enough flowers, plants and bushes to make the Charly More look like a big moving shrub heading out to sea.

Milne is not the first captain to believe the ferry has an effect deeper than transit. He believes it `'has always provided a positive benefit to her passengers' mental health and well-being,'' he writes in a passage of a book he's finishing about the islands and his time among them.

The book, still unnamed, is about 95 percent complete, and will feature Milne's original poetry, stories of his own, others that have been polished for centuries down in Stony Creek, and more. He says the Thimbles are going through a renaissance and he thought it would be a fitting time for a new book of tales.

Milne likens the job of being a ferry captain to the life of a firefighter - there is a lot of quiet time, standing by; there are rituals built like clockwork into the life, and then there are crazy, chaotic times, such as when he is closeto an island in an emergency.

Milne made the news not long ago when he rescued a fisherman whose boat had capsized, and then he and the fisherman noticed the body of the man's fishing buddy floating in the water. Milne had the grisly job of pulling the man's body from the sea.

There are many peaceful times, too. Milne looks forward to the rhythms of nature, watching for the patterns he knows will be remade each season. He keeps a daily log and jots down his thoughts in it, the exciting things like spotting a new bird, or the return of an old-feathered friend and his flock. For his tourist boat business, Milne has a website. He even got a cellphone awhile back, a change from the long tradition of having folks call the phone at the town dock at quarter of the hour to book their passages on the hourly ferry boat. He turns the phone off for much of the day, not wanting to be bugged to death. But at `'quarter of the top of the hour,'' he turns it on; the calls are forwarded from the familiar old phone at the pole to his cellphone.

`'There's something obscene with the phone ringing on a boat,'' he says of his phone-off policy while out to sea. `'When you leave the mainland, it should be your own time.''

Milne has had such a long-running dose of life on his own time, his own terms, that he says he and other captains at the town dock consider themselves to be `'pretty much unemployable'' by standard terms by now. So this is going to be how he makes his living the rest of his life, he says.

For the past 15 years, Milne has plied his living by going back and forth from the familiar town dock out to the islands during three seasons of the year. For years, people would ask him what he was going to do for a real job, but by now, it's become a real job. He separated the tourist boat from the ferry boat a number of years ago to make the ferry service quicker for residents and to spare them the torture of having to hear the old stories twice a day every day all summer every summer.

`'I wouldn't trade it,'' Milne says as the boat nears Outer Island, an island owned by the state university system in Connecticut. A half-dozen professors from Southern Connecticut State University are headed there, all looking for ways to weave the island into their curriculum. `'I never was destined for a shirt and tie," Milne says. "If I wasn't doing this, I'd probably be doing tug boats or something with yachts.''

Milne's dad worked in insurance and his mom was a teacher. He is one of five children, and he and his wife, Beth, have four children. He loves raising his kids in Stony Creek, saying it was, and is, a wholesome, safe place for children to come up in the world.

Milne recalls a time when he was a kid and he fell off the dock into the water; he wasn't a good swimmer. All the old-timers at the town dock - fishing lines suspended from the wooden railings above - hollered to him to get away from their fishing lines instead of offering any assistance. `'These days, you'd probably get sued for not helping a kid,'' he chuckles. `'It was summer and they were snapper fishing, they didn't want to see kids down here - they just screamed at me to get away from their bobbers!''